Founder of Honeypot Marketing an Internet Marketing Firm located in Ontario, British Columbia Canada and Costa Rica. Co-founder of ArtBarn Media and ArtBarn Partners and private equity and investment group focused on emerging technology and opportunities.

What I'm seeing in the SEO industry is a distinct 2 groups of people. There's those who actually do SEO and make money from it, and there's those who make their money talking about SEO and pandering to the SEO clique.

@wtfseo Man I could not possibly agree with you more on that point. January 27, 2010

Good points made all around. My software development work was heavily in Open Source including the Linux Core, The Mono Project and also in academia (visualization) - it was a small tight knit group and there was little to no posturing and flaming.

If you thought someone was wrong then it weas debated as opposed to turning into a schoolyard fight.

As for the conferences I do tend to write of SES, SMX and the major ones. I have spoken at a number of niche conferences and have considered attending somewhat smaller ones.

Trust me though if anyone gets up on a stage wearing a lab coat or gets into a whitehat versus blackhat SEO l33t conversation then you can be sure I'm not going to attend. That's just my personal choice, I'm not into the showmanship PT Barnum circuit.

@Rhea there are some angry monkeys out there and without naming names I just don't think swearing, putting others down, talking about how many shots and drinks you can have in a night is relevant in any way to someone's performance in SEO. You could probably name about 10 SEOs who are guilty of this and I frankly have no time for them :)

I have to agree completely with Jane on this one. I've actually been involved in Internet Marketing and specifically SEO since 2002.

I've worked in some of the most competitive niches including sports betting, casino, poker, dating, stock photos and more. I've done technical SEO on dynamic sites that get upwards of 1M uniques per day.

With a background in software development I like to think I'm fairly competent however from day one I made sure I would not get involved in the snarky and, to be blunt, immature internal world of SEO.

Unlike most industries this is one of the worst for flame wars that frankly denegrate the reputation of the entire SEO industry.

Look around, you don't see software developers, traditional marketers swearing at each other, name calling and posturing.

Small wonder we're looked upon negatively.

One of the areas I specifically and intentionally avoid is the conference circuit. There are many ways to keep up on the industry and still allow you to avoid these scenarios.

Frankly the "Conference SEO" crowd is generally busy patting each other on the back for the sake of promotion and new client generation.

I let my experience and results speak for themselves, I have no need or desire to participate.

If you are a true enterprise and require the datawarehousing features that Omniture can provide (example: Genesis) then Omniture beats GA hands down. However for the majority of small and medium websites GA will perform just fine.

However in the case of the small to medium sized business I would strongly recommend Piwik, it's API is spectacular and the plugin architecture allows for complete customization.

As with *any* tool it's a cost/benefit ratio that needs to be considered and the ROI is dependant on the organization. Anyone that complains about Omniture being "difficult" has either never worked with Omniture SiteCatalyst setup in a proper environment.

On two occassions I setup Omniture for companies with 1000+ employees and on both occassions it is made distinctly clear that a number of highly qualified Web Analyists are needed in order to integrate the systems and prvodie the setup of dashboards and custom reports across the company. Once complete, there is no comparison - Omniture beats GA hands down in every way.

Charmingly sarcastic, however there are many good reasons to take control of web analytics on your own systems or to use a paid solution.

As good as Google Analytics is on the surface, the harsh reality is that Google Analytics comes no where near the features and functionality of Omniture SiteCatalyst. I'm not going to list every single features side by side as that's already been done a million times.

Having said that - SiteCatalyst is pricey and may be out of the financial reach of smaller clients. In that case I would suggest using Piwik http://www.piwik.org - get yourself a good solid dedicated server and take control of your own analytics.

I think a serious sine wave or yo-yo effect would indicate a lack of authority for your site as it relates to that specific term. If you are moving up and down frequently then you need to analyse all of the common elements and really analyse your authority.

Of our numerous sites, the most authoritative do not suffer from the fluctuations while the niche sites will tend to move around. It's a key sign to get working on the core authority.

Also consider this, with Google purchasing YouTube they now also have a venue which is turning into a playground for social discourse and debate.
Think about this: Google has the world's largest index of personal information. Googel owns the major venues which are used for grass roots discussions.
Does Google then become more of a power house holding both the information and the venue? I wrote a post about this on my blog as well with tacticle examples:
Also consider this, with Google purchasing YouTube they now also have a venue which is turning into a playground for social discourse and debate.
Think about this: Google has the world's largest index of personal information. Googel owns the major venues which are used for grass roots discussions.
Does Google then become more of a power house holding both the information and the venue? I wrote a post about this on my blog as well with tacticle examples:
http://www.dannedelko.com/youtube-congress-in...October 10, 2006